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T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family.
He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and
Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a
bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which
he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication
(1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot
became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.
Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century
poetry. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with
language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim
at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in
language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult
poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction
has been immense. Eliot's poetry from Prufrock (1917) to
the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian
writer: the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922),
is essentially negative, the expression of that horror from which
the search for a higher world arises.
In Ash Wednesday (1930)
and the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible;
nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not to become a "religious
poet". and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious
force. However, his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
and The Family Reunion (1939) are more openly Christian apologies.
In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a traditionalism
in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his
pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards
the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet
of The Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot
tradition is a living organism comprising past and present in constant
mutual interaction. Eliot's plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935),
The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949),
The Confidential Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959)
were published in one volume in 1962; Collected Poems 1909-62
appeared in 1963.
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